When kids play instruments … badly

Our recent “When the kids are gone” post somehow meandered into a discussion about parents who force their children to play instruments. This immediately sent me to a dark place in my past that I hadn’t visited in about 25 years. I’ll share my story below. Yours in the comments.

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Menuhin, in happier times.

I started taking piano lessons at age 6 or 7. It was in many ways the perfect situation. For as long as I could remember, my parents have had a beautiful antique upright piano in the living room. And there was this extremely nice retired lady exactly seven houses down the street, who specialized in teaching piano to children. Ruth Carl was kind and patient and really understood kids, giving us each little journals, where she would mark our progress with enthusiastic notes and bird stickers. I should also note that my parents weren’t flush with cash at the time, but always paid for my sister’s and my lessons.

How did I reward them? By playing badly. Really, really badly. I’d like to say a lack of musical talent was the problem, but I think that was at most the smallest of factors. (I play the guitar fairly well now, without ever having taken a lesson.) No, sheer laziness combined with attention deficit disorder was responsible for my glacial progress with the piano. I was probably the oldest kid to still be playing “Hot Cross Buns” during the quarterly recitals in Ruth Carl’s living room. In later years, while other kids would be deciding which of several new works to debut, I was that kid who would butcher “The Spinning Song” for three or four recitals in a row. In the last three years as a piano student, I think I learned just three new songs.

All of this would be a small humiliation from my formative years, if it weren’t for the time I tried out to be a Menuhin scholar …

First a little background: For the last three years of elementary school, I went to a school for gifted children in the old Crocker mansion in Hillsborough. I didn’t feel particularly gifted. I was constantly in parent/teacher conferences to talk about my poor academic progress, and I now suspect I only got in as a legacy deal because my sister had been admitted three years earlier. Most of the kids who were there had some kind of special interest (it wasn’t quite like “Fame,” but close). I hung out with a lot of kids who could already program video games on computers in 5th and 6th grade. Other kids were good at sports, or writing, or music or whatever.

My special talent, apparently, was obliviousness, because when it was time for sign-ups for the Yehudi Menuhin musical scholarship, my 11-year-old response was “why not?” I mean, I did play the piano after all.

You may have never heard of Sir Yehudi Menuhin, but he was one of the most accomplished violin players of the 20th Century, and chose to settle in the San Francisco Bay Area. The man has been dead for 10 years and his Wikipedia entry is still bigger than most living celebrities. Menuhin had co-founded a music program at the school, and his name was constantly being dropped by teachers and administrators. In short, he was kind of a big deal.

I don’t remember too many details from the days before the show. Did I sign up on a piece of paper? Was it my parents’ idea, or did they even know I was doing it? Did I practice for this performance even once? But I do distinctly remember sitting in the hallway outside of the audition room, and hearing at least three students, the worst of whom was about 15 times better than I was. When it was my turn to walk in, I was probably physically shaking. Sitting against the wall were two middle-aged women, and a neatly dressed man in his late 60s or early 70s, looking expectantly, with his hands crossed neatly on his lap. Part of me still tries to tell myself it was someone else, some assistant of Menuhin’s who sat in that chair, but my heart knows the truth. This man definitely had the air of someone who had played his first violin solo at the age of 7 with the San Francisco Symphony.

“This is Peter Hartlaub,” one of the women said. “He will be playing … ‘The Spinning Song’ …”

I don’t know if it was the pressure of following actual child prodigies. Maybe it was the fact that for the first time ever, I tried to use the right piano pedal that sustains each note, hoping to give the piece a fuller sound. But this was no doubt my worst performance in a career of bad performances. Normally I would just meander tunelessly through a song, hitting the wrong note here and there. But this time I stopped and restarted at least twice. I’m sure it didn’t help that at the end, I stood up, faced my audience, and gave a sweeping exaggerated bow. (My signature move at recitals, where it always drew laughs.)

I think I killed a piece of Yehudi Menuhin’s soul that day. Seriously, the other two women in the room had these sort-of fake smiles, but Menuhin just looked sad and confused and defeated. It occurs to me more than two decades later that he may have thought I was mocking him.

Needless to say, I didn’t get the scholarship, and my private lessons were discontinued a year or two later. I recall the performance itself as vividly as anything from that era, but don’t remember much about the aftermath – I probably walked out of the first floor rehearsal room into the courtyard of the mansion, found some friends to play Dungeons and Dragons with. I wish I had one of the “Napolean Dynamite” endings, where I did a funny dance and Pedro got to become president, but it’s just not going to happen. Finding something good in all of this is going to be a bit of a stretch.

Sometimes, when you’re a kid, you’re just really bad at stuff. But only a very few of us get to be really bad at something in front of a living legend.